One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

MyAmericanFuture

MyAmericanFuture

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

January 28, 2014: Football Focalizes: Racism and Forgiveness

[In this Super
Bowl week, a series on some of the American issues and questions with which the
sport can help us engage. Join the huddle in comments, please!]

On the story that
should inspire me—and why it kind of doesn’t.

Last July, just
as NFL training camps were getting underway, video surfaced of
fourth-year Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley
Cooper angrily confronting and using a racial slur to attack an African
American security guard at a June country music concert. It seemed for a while
as if the controversy would end with Cooper no longer a member of the team, not
least because the starting quarterback at the time (and thus the player with
whom a wide receiver would need the most chemistry) was Michael Vick; but
instead, Cooper apologized
profusely, both publicly and privately to his teammates, was fined by the
team, and all involved moved on. Cooper ended up having a
pretty successful year (partly with Vick as quarterback and partly with his
replacement Nick Foles), and the team, after a disastrously bad 2012 season,
won its division and made the playoffs (which as I write this post have not yet
begun).

There’s a lot
that’s inspiring about the Cooper story. For one thing, compared to the divisions
and defensiveness that accompaniedDuck
Dynasty star Phil Robertson’s ignorant and hateful comments (which extended
to African Americans as well as gay people), in the Cooper case there was
widespread agreement that his words were wrong and hurtful, expressed by the
offender himself as well as in the broader conversations. (Those conversations
did also include some of the
“African Americans use the n-word” pushback that seems inevitable in every
such controversy, but most commentators were willing to acknowledge that
Cooper’s anger and threat differentiated his comments from other examples.) For
another, it seems, at least in the stories and narratives written about the
controversy’s aftermath, that the Eagles team and organization has genuinely
moved toward what I’d describe as one of my most ideal goals for America: a
mixed-race community working to acknowledge and engage with divisive and
troubling issues, and finding a new and hopefully more meaningful unity in
response to both the issue itself and that engagement with it.

That’s definitely
one way to see what happened, and I don’t want to dismiss it. But at the risk
of being a Debbie Downer, I have to say that there’s another way to interpret
the incident’s aftermath, one that would parallel it to the Phil Robertson
story instead of contrasting the two: that like Robertson (star of the highest-rated
reality TV show in television history), Cooper is very important to his
employer; and so that like Robertson, whose suspension
from A&E ended after a couple of weeks, Cooper has been quickly forgiven
and accepted back into the fold in order to allow him to continue performing
that important (and profitable) role. It’s not either-or, of course; the team
and ownership could be thinking of such business concerns at the same time that
the players and locker room were moving forward in the ways I described above.
And I’m not suggesting that Cooper should be forever disgraced or out of work
because of one moment and statement. Instead, and as always, I’d simply note
that we need to make sure to keep talking about the difficult and challenging
issue, to make sure that we collectively ca model that best-case scenario for
what transpired with the Eagles.

2 comments:

Please read using the sharpest, most finely-aged sarcasm...Phil Robertson (Robinson, Robeson, IDK/IDC) is a true-American. He speaks his mind and I support the freedom speech.. unless someone is actually trying to enact positive change or work towards the enlightenment of our culture, then they should shut their commie mouths.

Okay, silliness aside, normally I wouldn't waste my time thinking about a fool on a reality show. But after he decided to open his fool-hole and utter bigoted ugly nonsense I was more surprised by students, colleagues and people I considered my betters who rallied to his support.. or rather "free speeches" support. But these people, students, colleagues and most especially my betters didn't seem to be concerned with Edward Snowden, or Julian Asange exercising their freedom of speech. So we only want to protect freedom of speech when it supports a negative, hideous, antihumanist agenda, but flying-spaghetti-monster forbid we engage in a debate on the use of NSA's abuse of it's power without acknowledging that said government is trying to hunt down the very person responsible for the beginning of the discourse.Ugh. I give up.

Thanks for the comment! I certainly agree that "free speech" is in that case, as in most times it gets evoked these days, a red herring, or at best a shift of the focus away from the horrific content of the speech to the idea we can and should be able to say whatever with no consequences (economic, professional, personal, whatever). And perhaps the worst effect is that we end up not debating the content, and thus not even vaguely advancing our communal conversations about the actual issues (rather than this false "free speech" one).

#NoConfederateSyllabus

In response to the controversy over HBO's proposed show Confederate, Matthew Teutsch and I have collaborated on #NoConfederateSyllabus, a Google Doc that you all can contribute to as well. Check out an intro here: